Observer: What's the relationship of Dorian to The Picture of Dorian Gray?

Will Self: It's an imitation - and a homage. As a complete and professed rewrite of a classic, I think it's unique. The Picture of Dorian Gray is the prophecy and Dorian is the fulfilment.

Obs: What gave you the idea?

WS: The idea came through the suggestion that I adapt Wilde's Dorian Gray as a film. The minute I started looking at Wilde's original, this idea came unbidden. I'd never have approached the idea of doing it as a novel, I approached it as the idea of doing a screen adaptation, and when the screen adaptation ran into the sand, through my own inability to complete it, I decided the only way to get the thing out was to turn it back into prose.

Obs: From many possible themes in Wilde's novel, the one you go for is the contrast between appearance and reality. What attracted you to that?

WS: This dyadic proposition: the decadence of the 1880s and the decadence of the 1980s.

Obs: How much of Will Self is there in Dorian, Henry Wootton and Basil Hallward?

WS: Wilde famously said that Wootton was as the world saw him, that Hallward was as he really was and that Dorian was as he would like to be. It's a meaningless remark. Hallward is a vaguely effete cipher. Dorian is a nasty little piece of work in Wilde's book just as much as in mine. Wootton is, of course, Wilde. My Wootton is one part me and two other parts people I knew who fitted the bill.

Obs: You call Dorian 'a shameless reworking of our myth of shamelessness', but occasionally it seemed in some way a postmodern 'condition-of-England' novel.

WS: It's very much about England. There's also the extraordinary popular delusion and madness of crowds that surrounded the phenomenon of Diana Spencer which is a theme that the book runs with. I read Wilde once through, gutted it, analysed it and then did my best to forget it.

Obs: I was very struck by the amount of drugs in The Picture of Dorian Gray.

WS: They do an inordinate amount of drugs. Lord Henry Wootton, who, in my version, loses his title, takes opium throughout the book. He smokes opium-tinted cigarettes, as Wilde did. I think it is fair to assume that Wilde probably was an opiate addict. And at the end of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian submerges himself in the opium dens of East London.

Obs: So your picture in Dorian is perhaps not as druggy or sexy as it might have been? In some ways, it's quite restrained.

WS: Wilde's book was greeted by young gay men in England at the time as a cult novel. It became the standard around which a certain conception of contemporary homosexuality was mobilised, and it became a succès de scandale for that very reason. I don't think that I've done any more in my version than to push the door wide open so that we can clearly see what's going on on the bed.

Obs: Your work is always notable for its exotic language, for example 'anfractuous'.

WS: Anfractuous: twisty, curly, curvy. Anfractuous is from Eliot.

Obs: And 'anaphylaxis'?

WS: Anaphylaxis - that's double exposure to a certain kind of shock.

Obs: When did you first want to be a writer?

WS: Pretty much always, but I kept it close to my chest.

Obs: Who did you read as a child?

WS: Well, I read a lot of Russians, a lot of Turgenev and Dostoevsky. And I read Joseph Heller, I read Swift, I had Kafka quite young. I was a literary gourmand and read a vast amount. But I didn't study English at university, so I read a lot of European classics in translation rather than reading the English canon in any structured way.

Obs: Tell me about your parents.

WS: Peter, my father, was a professor of political science at the London School of Economics. He died in 1999. He was a gentle but vicious left-wing utopian socialist. He'd been part of Dick Sheppard's Peace Pledge Union in the 1930s and a conscientious objector during the war, but came from a strange upper-middle-class background.

I miss my dad. We got on very badly when he was alive and I feel rather guilty about that. He left my mother when I was nine. She was a tempestuous, passionate, acerbic, quite dark and rather obsessional Jewish-American woman. I used quite a bit of Mum's psyche for Lily Bloom in How the Dead Live.

Obs: Who are the writers that have influenced you as an adult?

WS: Well, it tends to be the last person I've read. You know that feeling? The anxiety of influence. I've been at pains to deny Martin Amis's influence, but I do think it's there. Ballard is one I always cite. I reread Crash when I was 20 and that's the book that really made me think, oh yeah, it's possible to write. It was that and Celine's Journey to the End of the Night that really fired me up in my early twenties and made me think, I'm going to write fiction.

Obs: What is the purpose of fiction?

WS: I don't know.

Obs: To you?

WS: I rarely read novels, I read military history. But when I do read fiction, I notice as an adult how much of yourself you have to give to it. I think novels are a form of of human relationship. They're a spiritual form in their way.

Obs: And a confessional form?

WS: What, for the author? Oh God, I hope not. Do you think so?

Obs: There's a part of Dorian which reads like a requiem for the 1980s. It also feels like a dark celebration of some very dark years.

WS: I was definitely a player. I've been around the Woottonesque scene. I mean, some of those scenes are very familiar to me. And whether or not it's anything I'm confessing, I don't know. Yes, maybe I am. Maybe that is fair. Maybe I should own that, as we say.

Obs: Do you find that your journalism feeds or threatens the fiction?

WS: I honestly don't know. I find it a torment, the idea of sitting down just doing the fiction. I'm a very antsy person. I find it hard to dedicate myself for a year or two years or even longer to write a novel. I need to know that I can fire off the occasional epistle to the Corinthians while I'm doing it. I just couldn't face the idea of sitting in a room doing nothing. And I've never wanted to be completely absorbed in fiction and literature in that way. I'm not really a literary journalist per se. I have no argument with people who are, but it's not my thing. I do a bit of political commentary and I do this, I do cultural journalism.

Obs: What are you working on now?

WS: I'm working on a collection of short stories. Dr Mukhti is a psychiatrist who's having a duel with a rival psychiatrist using mental patients as weapons. And then there's another kind of bigger novel I'm planning, a kind of post-apocalyptic novel of technological breakdown. As you do, of a Thursday.

· Will Self has been making headlines since the publication of his short-story collection, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991). Dorian, his fourth novel, has just been published